Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisted Tour Though the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square - Bill Landis

Descriere

nWarning: Watch your wallets and stay out of the bathroom n In a bygone era, when Times Square was crammed with porn shops, gun stores, and drug pushers, disenfranchised moviegoers flocked to the grindhouses along 42nd Street. If the gore epics, women-in-prison films, and shockumentaries showcased within their mildewed walls didn't live up to their outrageous billing, the audience shouted, threw food, and even vandalized the theaters. For dedicated lovers of extreme cinema, buying a movie ticket on the Deuce meant putting your life on the line. n Authors Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford came to know those grindhouses better than anyone else, and although the theaters were gone by the mid-1980s, the films remained. In Sleazoid Express, Landis and Clifford reproduce what no home video can -- the experience of watching an exploitation film in its original fight-for-your-life Deuce setting. Both a travelogue of the infamous grindhouses of yore and a comprehensive overview of the sleaze canon, Sleazoid Express offers detailed reviews of landmark exploitation classics and paints intimate portraits of directors whose notorious creations played the back end of triple bills for years on end. With wit, intelligence, and an unflinching eye, Landis and Clifford offer the definitive document of cinema's most intense and shocking moments as they came to life at a legendary place nTimes Square was once America's most notorious red light and theater district. Its main artery was the Deuce, a tiny strip of neon and concrete coldly fleshing out 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. The street was wall-to-wall movie theaters, punctuated by high frequency shoebox-sized adult bookstores, male street hustling, weapons shops, phony drug salesmen, bootleg electronics stores, tourist junk shops, and guys offering couples to take their quickie Polaroid portraits while they sat in wicker chairs. The Deuce was the most intense block on which one could ever hope to see a movie. The main venues were grindhouses, down-at-the heels creations left over from the Minsky's Burlesque days-and showcases for the wildest and most extreme films in cinematic history. Their disenfranchised audience were film's harshest critics, demanding that the exploitation movies the theaters screened lived up to the promises made by their graphic, outrageous ad campaigns and shocking trailers. If the movies let them down, the audience would react by shouting, tossing food containers, and physic